Complexity in Life and Faith

Life is full of complexity. You see the multifaceted nature of everything when you study something for a day, or a year, or even decades. That's how long it takes to truly attempt to learn all the details of something at times.

The same goes for knowing the Bible, God, and living a Christian life. Often people want it to be simple: Hear the message once and respond, and that's it. Or go to church, and you've got it. Those are good thing, but there's more.

The gospel is simple in a way. But it also has a beautiful depth to it too. When you accept Christ, all you need to know are some basic truths. But after that, growing in knowledge is important.

What more is there to grow in knowledge, you may be asking. Here's a starter list to help you see what topics there are:

• Grace. The true meaning of grace.
• Law/Commands/Sin. How this relates to grace, too, but we must first see why we need and are given grace. And learning how God's commands really are good for us.
• Wisdom. Since life is complex, sometime discernment and good judgment are needed. The Bible helps us in learning wisdom.
• Love. What it means to truly live out those two commands. It is active and much more. I've created a list of 6 posts on loving others.
• How God has related to humans throughout history. This includes feeling loved and accepted by Christ if you're a Christian.
• The Trinity.

I hope you don't feel overwhelmed by the list. It's more of a privilege to think of the wealth of interesting things that help us grow closer to God.

Learning about these things can aid in living in a Christian way.

Learning About God

When we study God's Word and think through what living a Christian life means, it's important to think about who God is and how he relates to people. Often it's easy to take a passage of Scripture and only think about what that means for what we should do. That's fine to do at some point, but it's important to be sure we take time to think about what it means about God and how he relates to us.

If we never study or think about God's power and strength, and how he uses it to help us, it might be much harder to cast our anxieties and burdens on Christ (Psalm 55:22 and 1 Peter 5:7, ESV). Knowing about God's power helps us to be able to respond to God's call.

If we never study God's mercy and gentleness to his people, including us, then we might find it hard to be merciful and gentle to others and ourselves out of love.

If we never study God's pure holiness and goodness, we might not realize how extremely blessed we are to even get a chance to talk to him.

Some people worry that a lot of theology isn't practical, but how we view God and how he relates to us definitely affects the way we live. We should also of course see what the Bible has to say about humans too.

While learning the attributes of God is of great importance, it's more important to see God as he interacts in history—how the Christian God is a personal God. Read more on this in Danny's article "God Known through Actions."

Danny also wrote about how theology speaks to all areas of life in "Theology as a Meta-Discipline."

Being Someone

Obviously change of any type cannot come about without action in the world. But often action without foundation is futile.

Many times our efforts our undermined by our lack of preparation. One thinks of Billy Graham who suggested that at the end of his ministry one thing he would change if he did his ministry again was to spend more studying and less time preaching.

Often to have an affect we must first be someone. Many people feel that spending hours in prayer, studying God's word or studying theology will in some sense be a waste.

It is interesting because the bible does not have this view of itself. We need to do something relevant the modern church says.

The bible describes itself as relevant. We need to sit before the feet of God. To sit with Jesus and listen to what he has to say is more relevant that action at times.

Often the issue is we do too much and focus too little on trying to know God. We can often do far more by trying to do far less.

The bible makes the case of this by the concept of Sabbath. Really at the heart is the idea that in 6 days we can do more with faith than 7 days without faith.

Humbling Ourselves Before God

Many Christians have great difficulty in humbling themselves before God.  Many college professors often settle for analyzing God rather than worshiping him.  This is an incredibly difficult thing to do and only an academic or a fool can pull it off.  Pulling away the worship aspect from knowledge about God or making the study of the bible dull is quite a difficult task.  It is difficult to make the infinitely enjoyable dull.

Anyway back to humbling yourself before God.  Being forced to kneeling down, empty, devoid of anything to commend yourself by is a great fear of our culture.  But consider it like this God is a mountain brook.  We come in great need of quenching thirst, we come without anything to give the brook, we keel down and deeply gulp and enjoy it.  If there is no one righteous no not one and there is no one who does good should we despair?  No because God is most pleased when we come to him empty ready to be filled with his love.  He is most happy in this because this is the way he is most glorified and we should be happy in this because this will be the way our thirst is finally quenched.

We Will Be Most Satisfied When We See, Savor, and Make Much of God

A bit from Piper:

“If the purpose of God – flowing from the very essence of what it means to be God – is that he be known and enjoyed and praised as infinitely glorious in his free and sovereign grace, then the meaning of our existence is clear. We exist to know and enjoy and praise and display the glory of God’s free and sovereign grace. We exist to see and savor and sing – and spread a passion for – the glory of God’s grace.”

A bit from me:

And I would like to add if we exist for the purpose of seeing and savoring and making much of God then it should well be easily be inferred that we will be most satisfied when we see, savor, and make much of God.  For, God as an infinitely wise creator did not create us in a way so that we would find anything other than our most ultimate joy in him.  In fact it is hard to imagine us finding anything other than our ultimate joy in the infinite beauty and brilliance of God.